


gold

by elliptical



Series: to own a galaxy [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-03 00:57:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5270570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's sweet, and comforting.  Your Helmsman is the only troll in the world who will never be able to hurt you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gold

**Author's Note:**

> writes more in this verse. oh no  
> note, condy very much considers herself the hero of her own story, but she is Fucking Terrible  
> mind the tags
> 
>  
> 
> _statues and empires are all at your hands_  
>  _water to wine and the finest of sands_  
>  _when all that you have's turning stale and it's cold_  
>  _you'll no longer feel when your heart's turned to gold_  
>  _who can you trust? who can you trust?_  
>  _-gold, imagine dragons_

Your Helmsman is a delicate project.

He's asleep for most of the installation process to keep his body from going into shock, because he is a powerful brain crushed into a hilariously inadequate meatsack. He is sickness and burnout and gaunt hollowness, scarred over from his previous masters and battles. He's been running from you and trapping himself in his body for so long, it's pathetic, it's endearingly pitiful how little he understands.

There's a certain trauma to any ship or power plant installation, of course. It's hard to minimize that when you're releasing energy from the confines of its initial container and letting it rush into a form much larger than itself. Well-behaved helmsmen are prepared for the transition, but when you've spent your whole life running from the Empire and committing dozens of individual acts of terrorism and treason, well.

In the end, when they were finally betrayed, when your drones razed down the city sheltering them and clawed them screaming from the rubble, he was like a collapsing star. You'd seen footage of him before, but that was nothing compared to the bolts of red and blue he threw from eyes and hands, tearing through everything in his path as though he could destroy your army. Truth be told, if the tranquilizer guns hadn't brought him down first, he might have. You can see why the gods have promised him to you.

But he's fragile when he sleeps, in a way that makes you suspect the gods had more in mind than just increasing your power. The biowires consume him, growing up and burrowing into his flesh and anchoring and siphoning, and he will be so much better when he's integrated into his new self, but for now it seems a shame to shred the old limbs. Stretched between the struts of the helmscolumn, opened with surgical precision, altered and modified - the affection you feel is dizzying. He's yours, yours, will always be yours, and there is no power in this universe that can make him more helpless than your hands.

You could do anything you wanted to him whether he's conscious or not. Of course, this is true about... pretty much every troll in your Empire. The fact that you _can_ doesn't always mean you _should_ , which you've learned more than once the hard way. Even with unlimited power, you have to be careful what strings you pull to garner the results you want. Plenty of other people want the power, after all, and one wrong string pulled, one mistaken vulnerability exposed -

But your Helmsman will never be able to hurt you. The gods have given you a precious gift.

\---

Admittedly, the gods have also given you a very cranky gift.

You left his mind and memories intact. He screams and spits and tries to attack the crew when he first wakes, like a particularly ill-behaved pet, but the upgraded column does its work. The power he sparks off runs through the wires and charges the backup engines. When physical intimidation doesn't get him anywhere, he demands to know the whereabouts of his family, and goes back to screaming when your head mechanic ignores the question in favor of explaining the ship integration to him.

Ungrateful, really, and he has no idea how nice you're being by keeping him in the dark about his moirail's execution. He doesn't understand yet. He will eventually, and you have time, all the time in the world to decide how you want to pull his strings. These decisions you'll consider carefully. Any random troll picked up planetside can become your plaything (come to think of it, you have half a dozen in your block you're getting bored with now, should cull them before you get distracted), but gifts from the gods are rare. You do have some self control. You'll use it to be careful with him.

You don't have anywhere to fly yet. You pull your mechanics and programmers off the project, lock the helmsblock doors, and give him a perigree to himself to adjust.

\---

The ship starts having problems a week in, when he finally realizes that he's not a troll trapped as a living battery, he's a ship powered by a used-to-be troll body. You make sure the mechanics note and categorize all of the weak points so they can be repaired before flight. It would be pretty unfortunate if your helmsman threw you out an airlock because he was having a temper tantrum, after all.

Three weeks in, his network-spammed demands to see his family prompt six separate complaints from the staff. You're not annoyed by the spam, but you are annoyed by people making the spam your problem, and you think it's time to test the true strength of the column. So you find the highest quality file available of the execution and helpfully play it across his neural interfaces.

The resulting power surge smashes the monitors of every console in the ship.

...But when all is said and done, he's sobbing quietly in the column, the bioware is all intact, and he's too weakened by the automatic sedation to raise his head. Obviously you'll have to implement safeguards against more power surges, but even your helmsman's mind going supernova is not enough to tear him from you.

It's sweet, and comforting. He will never be able to hurt you.

\---

Repairing and upgrading the ship takes nearly a quarter sweep. In the meantime, you have more to do than obsess over your Helmsman. At times he slips your mind entirely, considering you have an entire empire to run, but you know you should speak to him. He still won't understand. You don't expect him to understand for a very, very long time, hung up as he is on mortality and justice and revenge. But you should try, at least, start tugging on the strings.

You enter the block and wade through the pool toward the column. He's gotten good at drifting his consciousness through the ship, so he doesn't acknowledge your presence until you say, "Look at me."

He spits.

"Well, that was fucking rude." You wipe your face. "Not sure what you're trying to prove, guppy."

"Thhhhcrew you, fuck, fuck, fffuck you," he snarls, and he's trying so hard that you pity him a little more. Does he honestly think playing a rabid barkbeast will make him look stronger? Does he honestly think this is what it takes to get a rise out of you?

"You'll like flying," you say.

"Fuck you!"

"I've been told it's one of the most exhilarating experiences a psionic can have. 'Course, that could also be the propaganda. I'm sure if you're determined to be a crotchety old man about it then you'll fucking hate it."

"Fuck you, you backwards-ass heinous evil selfish hairball suffocation waiting to happen, you manipulative bitch, fucking, fucking wader, give me back my psionics and we can see how strong you are with electricity running all the way through your gills..."

You smile and lean against the column, tracing your fingers over his chest. His muscles spasm and he draws in a sharp breath, and he is so helpless, so helpless and pliant underneath you, you can do anything you want to him and he knows it and you know it. His words are the last weapon he has to hurl at you, so he doesn't conceptualize using them for his own self-preservation. He is rage and grief and pain and he wants so badly to be able to hurt you, and he can't, and you are dizzy-drunk with the exhilaration.

"I don't want this, fuck, I don't want this, I've never wanted this," he says, and there's the fear, and he's so sweet you could die.

He won't believe you if you try to explain now. He might never believe you, but he will learn the truth himself given time.

"You don't know what you want, honeygrub," you say. "There's so much you don't understand."

"No, no, see, the thing here is that I really fucking do know what I want and I get that you're a pretentious highblood and that at best you've been schoolfed that you know better than everyone else and that lowbloods are stupid sheep and our minds aren't our own but I really fucking do know what I want, and it's not this, it's not this." His breathing is harsh, labored. "Don't pretend this is anything other than you being a sadist."

"It's so much more than me being a sadist. But believe what comforts you. We have time."

"Time?" He barks a laugh. "Right, time, the average span of what - what - four sweeps before a burnout and that's for trolls in their prime, I'm chronically ill, injured, I'm a culling waiting to happen and you locked me into the heart of the most demanding ship in the Fleet - time - time - two journeys before my internal organs melt and all this effort wasted and you worthless, worthless, worthless" -

His head jerks. He's crying, and the fear is still there, straining his vocal cords, but underneath the primal terror there's longing. He thinks his entire family is dead, since you let him draw his own conclusions about the execution. He wants to be with them. So wrapped up in pointless sorrows, poor thing, poor thing, he doesn't understand anything.

"You don't need to worry about that," you say, reaching up to swipe the tears away, exceedingly gentle with the movement. You're digging cruel enough claws into him already even if he can't feel them yet, and it's important to tug on the strings rather than snap them. "Trust me, grubling. We have time."

\---

Two sweeps later, you pull his mortal body back from the edge of a burnout. This side of your powers is new and unexplored, because you're not used to having people you like enough to keep around. You've extended the lifespans of your toys on occasions when you went farther than you meant and didn't want them dead yet, but this - keeping him alive because you want him close, this is the most intimate thing you've ever done.

You stroke your fingertips over his temples and close up the scars, soothing the sparking ache in his pain, cooling him from the outside in. You drag your lips over his neck and shoulder and mouth, breathing Life back into him, and his torn muscles and frayed nerves knit themselves together at your command. He doesn't understand what's happening, delirious as he is with the fever. He kisses you back because he knows - he is in pain, and the primal instincts inside him are afraid to die, and he can feel himself shutting down, and you soothe the burning and the terror, and when given a chance to stop thinking, he knows he needs you.

When he comes back to himself, healthier and fuller and more powerful than before he was helmed, he begins to understand. He'd been so pitifully obsessed with his mortal concerns that he hadn't even noticed he'd ascended to a separate tier of existence.

The knowledge is enough to push him into a full-scale nervous breakdown, but hey. You never said the process would be smooth sailing.

\---

He's very good at self destruction, but the safeguards don't let him itch the tendencies the way he wants. He wants to fly the ship into a sun and kill everyone on board. He wants to burn himself out before you notice and pull him back. He wants to change the courses and lose himself in the vastness of space. Trapped as he is by his own programming, he turns his attention to goading you, because he wants you to hurt him since he can't hurt himself. It's transparent and kind of cute. You can't help being endeared by the way he tries to cut his own strings and sobs when he can't.

Because he's so stubborn, the learning is a slow process. Everything he ever valued about himself has been tied down so tightly that he'll never access it again. Everything he ever valued about the world has been torn from him over and over. You make him commit a few of the genocides himself, sometimes because you're bored and sometimes because you want to push him closer to the edge. You can be a patient person, of course, but you're so eager to get to the end.

Eventually comes the night when he spams your console with pings demanding that you visit the helmsblock, shifting from irritation to insistence to exhaustion, and then to pleas of IneedyouIneedyouIneedyou. His vitals are fine, so you take your own sweet time about making your way down, a not-so-subtle reminder that you don't exist at his whim.

When you enter, he's crying, straining toward you. He's been so terribly lonely since he lost his family, but he doesn't have anyone but himself to blame for that, considering he won't let you in. He could fix everything if he wasn't so damn stubborn.

"What is it?" you ask.

"Please," he says, and well, you can't deny him when he's being so sweet.

You climb up the column and anchor an arm around his shoulders, pressing close, tendrils of your hair curling over his body like a second set of bioware. He rests his head on your shoulder and cries harder, flinching like he's afraid you'll leave him for it, the way you've left him during his other meltdowns. Poor thing, still learning. As if you'd leave him like this. All he ever had to do was ask for you.

"Shh," you murmur.

"I don't want to do this anymore," he sobs. "I don't want this, I don't, please, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please don't make me, don't make me."

"Sorry? Sorry for what?"

"I'm sorry I followed him, I'm sorry I believed him, I'm sorry I rebelled I'm sorry I tried to bring down the Empire I'm sorry I'm sorry I was wrong I'm sorry please please please don't make me do this anymore I'm so sorry I'm so tired I'm so tired I'm sorry I'm..."

"Shh." You kiss the shell of his ear, and he goes quiet. "Shh, shh. There we go, see, that's all I wanted. Are you ready to listen to me now? Are you ready to let me explain?"

"Will you ever let me die?"

"I love you, you stupid grub," you say.

Normally he'd yell, say you don't know what love is, say this is a fucked up way of showing you love him, invoke the names of his dead quadrantmates and claim he's known love already and it has no place here. But he's tired. He's tired of fighting you and he's tired of fighting himself, so he just breathes out against your neck, and you think he's finally ready to understand.

You tell him everything you know.

The gods are from a dead universe, and their emissary whispers to you and rose you up from your hatchbed, and you earned your place in this Empire when you threw your fork through the chest of the last Empress. She has been gone so long no one remembers her name but you. You took what she created and made it stronger and better. You stabilized the planet. You prevented the extinction of your species. This galaxy has belonged to you since before he was a whisper of existence, and you have no intention of giving it up to anyone. You are ruthless and you are strength incarnate and you will reap the spoils of your wars and this is who you're meant to be, because someone has to be on top, and the least you can do is make sure it's someone competent.

"You're not competent, though," he whispers. "You kill people by the millions, extinguish planets, leave the ruling to the fucking clowns - you enslave lowbloods and deny them the chance to live and turn the highbloods against each other and make blood hunting into a fucking sport, you..."

"And here you were just apologizing for following him," you say.

He flinches, whimpers.

"It's all right." You stroke his hair, the strands catching on your rings. "I don't get mad. Not at you. Who could more effectively hold this power? I have all the strings. The systems work and have always worked. This world is mine forever."

"You only care about holding the power, though," he says. "You only care about power for power's sake."

"Well, of course. And for wealth's sake." You kiss his temple. "What else is there?"

"If you really need to ask me that, you'll never understand."

That strikes a surprising cord of irritation in your chest. You will freely admit you don't know everything, and that taking advice from people is a good way to keep from getting killed, but you do not like being talked down to. You're more than firm in your values. You certainly don't need to be lectured on the importance of getting touchyfeely, echoes of lies and delusions that made the people scream for your blood. It's sort of a shame that your beloved is still a raging heretic, but hey, no one's perfect.

Anger is not the point here, anyway. He can't hurt you. "We're meant to be together," you say. "We've always been meant for each other. You've been destined for me since you hatched. My Empire would only be a shadow of itself without you. You and I, we're immortal. We're going to watch generations and stars and planets rise and fall, we're going to carve a warpath through all of them. We're the closest thing to divinity our race has. We are the only two people who will never lose each other. You'll have to love me if you ever want to be happy again, because you won't ever die. Mortal fears and grief don't matter anymore, don't you understand? I'm the only thing that matters. The people don't matter - they all die in a handful of sweeps anyway, what have they ever mattered? You don't cry when you step on an anthill."

"So..." He shudders hard. "You're waiting for me to forget them? To embrace this, this, this fucked up 'destiny' you've dreamed up for us? That's what you're waiting for me to understand?"

"You can either embrace it or not. Doesn't change a thing. It'll just make us both happier if you do. And I know you'd love to be petulant and spiteful to annoy me, but all you're doing is damning yourself to eternal misery so you can be a mild inconvenience. Seems like a disproportionate self-punishment."

He pulls back and stares you in the face. The look in his eyes is more despair than fury, and it tastes like victory. You won as soon as the Signless gave up, and he knows it. Everything else has been him stalling on the acceptance front, because when he accepts the loss then he will become everything he's ever hated, and he puts far too much stock in his sense of self.

"Signless threatened you," he says finally. "Were you afraid of him?"

You brush your thumb over his bottom lip. "Yes," you say. It feels good, this honesty. "But fear isn't always weakness. Without fear I'd never be able to identify threats, and I'd never be able to pull the right strings. The war was inconvenient, but I had no reason to fear him as soon as he died. Dead men can't kill you."

"He never wanted to kill you."

"He wanted to kill the image of me. Same difference."

"And me? Are you afraid of me?"

You can't help smiling. "I'll tell you a secret, guppy," you say, ducking in to kiss him on the mouth. "You're the only person in this whole universe that I'm not afraid of. That's why I love you so much."

\---

He understands.

The acceptance comes later, when you buy his love with his family. This is how relationships are meant to work anyway. You give each other things that make you happy, and the love blossoms from that. He gives you the galaxy and the heady rush of conquest and a distraction from the fear and a warmth in the emptiness. You give him drugs and programming subroutines that speak in the voices of his dead loved ones, and he adores you for it.

He can't let go of the mortal values, but he can compromise with computer-generated ghosts. You keep being newly surprised by how much you pity him, and even more surprised when he pities you in turn. It's... not the same way you pity him. It's not even quite red or pale, but that's okay. In fact, it's a relief. One person in the universe can shoulder the burden of your vulnerabilities. After all, he can't hurt you, and if you're soft with him then you can be cold everywhere else.

Your programmers figure out how to simulate textures, guided by his feedback and your direction, so that he can fantasize about warmth on his cheeks or purring olive trolls relaxed against his chest or the cool press of jadeblood fingers on his forehead. The evening after you activate the program, you wake to spam on your personal channel

01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 

repeated again and again. When you check the camera feed in the helmsblock, he's calm in the wires, drifting outside himself, utterly at peace. It was never about the morals, really. He's fine with being this, being First Imperial Helmsman, destroyer of worlds, havoc wreaker, Empire expander, yours yours yours. Poor thing just didn't want to be alone. You can relate.

You told him he'd like flying.


End file.
